Browsing Archives of Author »Bruce Baker«

Education policy research and the rhetoric emergent from that research typically fails to represent the realities – the real distribution – of schooling across our nation. We focus extensively on urban schooling most often ignoring what might or might not work in the suburbs or rural areas. We focus on development of reading and math/STEM […]

I’ve been spending much of my spring and summer trying to get a handle on the various business practices of charter schooling, the roles of various constituents, their incentives and interests – financial and otherwise – in the operations of charter schools. Throughout this process, I also try to consider how or whether similar practices […]

Comments Off on About those Ed Regs for Improving Teacher Equity: A preview of new (old) findings

Doc student Mark Weber and I have been blogging a bit less lately and digging in on a number of interesting academic papers ranging from analyses of charter school expenditures to inter and intra-district resource inequality. Among these papers is an analysis of data provided by ED for states to run preliminary analyses of measures […]

Comments Off on The Collapse of State School Finance Systems & Why It Matters

This post is a follow up to my recent post identifying America’s Most Financially Disadvantaged School Districts. Let me start by summarizing the why it matters part, which I address more thoroughly here. The bottom line – a substantial body of empirical research indicates the positive influence of state school finance reforms on student outcomes. […]

Comments Off on America’s Most “Financially Disadvantaged” (e.g. Screwed) School Districts 2013

For a number of years I’ve been producing lists of what I call America’s Most Screwed Public School Districts. The kind folks at Center for American Progress, in 2012, worked with me to put out a report on these districts, and how they got where they are. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/BakerSchoolDistricts.pdf I’ve also shown on this blog that […]

There’s been more than a little opportunistic, misguided bloviating about Baltimore in recent weeks, including misguided discussions of and references to per pupil spending in Baltimore City Public Schools. The gist of most claims has been that Baltimore City Schools spend more than most other large (or large urban) districts in the country, but their […]

Tuition tax credit programs establish privately governed entities that provide scholarships, typically to “lower income” families, for their children to attend private schools. The idea is to provide tax credits to corporations and individuals who give money to these tuition scholarship entities. The compelling governmental interest for these policies, as we often hear is that […]